


Ask and Ye Shall Receive

by Fenix21



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s05e14 My Bloody Valentine, Gen, Guilt, episode coda, pre-destiel, sam detoxing from demon blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 05:14:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7963849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fenix21/pseuds/Fenix21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>The rain was picking up, pelting him coldly against the cheek, sharp little stings that he clutched close because at least it was something to feel. He turned his face upward, eyes to the perpetual, infinite black. There was nothing there. He knew that. God was not in the house, if he'd ever been at all; but like a child who believed in the security of bedtime prayers and the certainty that its mother's touch could cure all ills, he gave in to the hopeless sobbing voice inside him.</em>
</p><p>Dean prays for help and gets it from a source he didn't expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ask and Ye Shall Receive

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a very old piece that I plumbed from the depths of my hard drive, most likely abandoned at the time because I felt all I was doing was rewriting the scene to my liking. However, upon rediscovery, I found it to be more of a gem than I originally thought, and I hope you do, too :)
> 
> And feel free to read this as pre-Destiel if it suits your fancy, I think that was an original intent when I started it.

'That’s not him in there,' Castiel said. 'Not really.'

Dean tipped the bottle to his lips again. It tasted like dust in his mouth. 'I know.'

Castiel sighed. It sounded soul deep, and maybe it was, just not from his soul. Not really. Jimmy had been a good, strong, deep feeling man and some of that hung onto his vessel when he died. Castiel tapped it inadvertently in times like this when he was at a loss to feel the appropriate emotion. 'Dean, Sam just needs to get it out of his system. Then he’ll be—'

'Listen,' Dean turned his face away, tears surging hard and fast to the backs of his eyes as Sam let out another gut wrenching plea for help. 'I just, uh…I just need to get some air.'

Dean rolled up from the wall where he leaned and trudged up the stairs, his want to get away from the pain he was letting Sam drown in propelling him forward while his gut deep need to save his baby brother from the monsters in the dark—either real or the machinations of his own mind—dragged him backward and made his steps heavy, leaden against the wood, like the low, keening knell of a church bell announcing death. 

Castiel leaned away from the door a little, thinking of following Dean upstairs, but Sam cried out again and he dropped back. If Dean couldn’t stay, then he knew he had to. Even if Sam didn’t know they were outside the door, he felt some obligation to stay and listen to the suffering that he hadn’t been strong enough to help Sam avoid. 

In a way this was his fault. All of it. Not just Sam screaming in pain behind the iron door, sweating out the blood and rankness of a few gallons of demon blood, but everything…from the beginning. 

If he had succeeded in getting to Dean sooner in hell, as were his instructions, then none of this would have happened. These boys would have gone off together to fight evil just as they had always done, and the seals would be intact, and Lucifer would not be roaming the earth in a decrepit, broken down vessel on the verge of implosion just laying in wait for Sam to give in to the darkness behind his heart and say ‘yes.’

So, much of the blame fell on Castiel, but Dean didn’t see it that way. Dean didn’t blame anyone for anything except himself. Even Sam, whose actions of the last year had been less than wholesome and hardly beyond reproach, Dean would not blame. He took that into himself as well because Sam was his little brother, his responsibility, his family, the love of his damn life, and no matter what he’d done, he couldn’t save him from himself. 

That cut Dean deeper than anything, and the knife had plunged in again tonight, twisting hard at the sight of Sam ‘jumped up’ on demon blood, effortlessly ripping and tossing the hell spawn back from whence it came. The effort had cost him, true enough. Nose bleeding, resources drained from that final act of exploding the souls from Famine’s crippled body, Sam had managed to stay on his feet to the Impala, but had collapsed across the back seat, his last words a request to get him to Bobby’s…fast, and lock him up until he bled out in isolation the dregs of power stirring in his blood. 

Dean had done exactly that, stopping long enough to clean their things out of the hotel room, and then driving all night. He’d taken one look at Castiel’s green face, warned him that he was walking if he puked in the Impala, and didn’t even bother to ask if he was in any shape to zap them anywhere.

Sam cried out again, voice gone hoarse with his pleas to be let out, for someone to help him, not able to remember that it was his own demands that had put him in the panic room early this morning. 

Dean had cuffed him with infinite care, wrapping Sam’s ankles and wrists with thick layers of an old, soft sweatshirt Bobby had ripped into strips. He’d put pillows under Sam’s head and left a canteen hanging on the steel frame of the cot with the drinking tube within easy reach of Sam’s mouth if he just turned his head. 

He’d offered to stay even knowing he couldn’t. Sam shook his head, not trusting himself to speak for fear he would accept the offer and beg Dean to do exactly that, putting him in danger, even if Sam was cuffed and locked to the cot. Dean had straightened, nodded, and reluctantly left the room, swinging the heavy iron door closed behind him.

The first few hours had been quiet. Dean leaned against the door, then paced, then sat on the stairs. Castiel kept quiet vigil off to the side, having recovered his faculties on the drive here and after violently emptying the contents of his stomach by the back fence of the salvage yard. Bobby brought down a bottle of whiskey and a couple of tumblers, had sat with Dean for a few hours, sipping in silence while Dean forewent the glass and just swigged out of the bottle. 

Then the screaming had started, and the begging, and Bobby had disappeared back upstairs pale and shamefaced that he couldn’t stomach Sam’s suffering like a good parent ought to be able. 

Dean did not think less of Bobby for not staying to listen to Sam scream and choke and gag and scream again, and the steady jerk and clank of the cuffs as he tried to wrestle whatever nightmares were gathering in the room with him. Castiel took up closer station to the door, in an effort to let Dean know that it was alright if he needed some distance, alright even if he needed to leave all together. He tried to stay, sucking down mouthfuls of whiskey in hopes that it would drown him and shut out the sounds of Sammy in that room, but in the end he walked away.

Castiel looked up the stairs. The sound of Dean’s boots traveling across the floor and the front door opening and shutting filtered downward. The rest of the house was silent, but for Sam. Castiel closed his eyes, cocked his head slightly, and listened.

 

Dean stumbled down the front porch steps and out into the maze of crumpled, rusted out hulks of junker cars in the yard, bottle dangling from his fingers. It was starting to rain. Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled, so low that he heard it more through the soles of his boots than the damp laden air. He found his Baby, gleaming dark, shiny and welcoming. He'd sought her out, he knew, as a comfort, something to lean on, some sanctuary to take when he felt like he'd failed everything and everyone. He could put his foot down in Fate's path, put a shoulder in her gut and shove, but she couldn't be stopped, moved through him like some river wraith, but could never be put down so easily with fire. 

He lifted the bottle to tilt it to his lips.

_That's one deep, dark nothing you got there, Dean. Can't fill it, can you? Not with food or drink. Not even with sex._

The bottle slipped in his grip. He stared at it, tried to remember the burn of it in his throat, the numbness it brought behind it, but there was nothing. Nothing at all. 

_You're not hungry, Dean, because inside, you're already...dead._

The rain was picking up, pelting him coldly against the cheek, sharp little stings that he clutched close because at least it was _something_ to feel. He turned his face upward, eyes to the perpetual, infinite black. There was nothing there. He knew that. God was not in the house, if he'd ever been at all; but like a child who believed in the security of bedtime prayers and the certainty that its mother's touch could cure all ills, he gave in to the hopeless sobbing voice inside him.

'Please…I can't…' He sucked back against the sob lumping up in his throat. 'I need a little help. Please…'

The rain pattered down, stronger now, soaking slowly through Dean's shirt while he stood there, face upturned, eyes closed, murmuring the words soundlessly into the night, again and again. There was no one to hear, and he counted himself weak and a fool for even trying, but he couldn't stop and he couldn't move. His body felt leaden, like he might never be able to budge from this spot again, like the wet mud might clutch and suck at him until he was rooted to the ground, and he didn't care. He didn't care at all, about anything. For one precious second, the space between one heartbeat and the next, he didn't care that his brother was strung out on demon blood and screaming his way back to sanity; he didn't care that Lucifer was risen and on the warpath to the apocalypse; and he didn't care that it all hung on the balance of their success: a high school drop-out, a demon blood junkie, and a broken angel. 

The moment didn't last.

There were hands on his back, pressed against his shoulder blades, cupping the bones carefully like they were delicate carvings, thumbs tracing through skin and muscle.

'You are not weak, and you are not a fool, Dean. And there is always someone to hear you, even if it is not God.'

'…Cas.' Dean's head fell forward. The bottle dropped from his hand and thunked solidly on the hard gravel below. He started to go down, knees giving way under the sudden return of the weight of everything he thought he didn't care about, but then there was more than hands at his back. There was a body, small and strong, hands at his hips to steady him, and he would swear the soft rustle of feathers all around as an unreasonable warmth cocooned him and held the chill rain at bay. A cheek pressed against his shoulder. 

'Do you think every hero kept his faith, Dean?' Castiel asked softly. 'Do you think none of them doubted, in their purpose, in their strength? Two thousand years ago, I held the hand of a man while he cried, on his knees, in a garden, doubting the world, doubting himself, doubting the love of a father whose voice he could not hear who had condemned him to death in the name of his own faith.' 

Dean started a little in his grip. 'You mean…?'

Castiel sighed. 'I've lived among humans for many thousands of years, watched you rise to greatness and fall into darkness. I have seen my father's hand among you, and I have seen the terrible emptiness his absence has created in your souls. Never in all that history have I encountered a truly righteous man who did not at some time doubt all that he was and dance on the edge of hopelessness and despair because he could not keep his faith.'

Dean sucked in a shuddering breath. 'What's it all for, Cas? How do we go on against this? When's it going to end?'

Castiel was silent a long moment, and Dean allowed himself to lean back into the offered comfort, felt the stroke of silken feathers against his cheek. 'It will never end, Dean. The battle began long ago, and has been waged by heroes of every race and creed and station from peasant to king across the face of the earth for millennia. There is no end, except the end of creation if Lucifer succeeds in bringing on the Apocalypse, and I do not think that is a peace you can live with, Dean.'

'Cas…' Dean's voice broke. 'What do I do?'

Castiel lifted his cheek from Dean's shoulder, rose up until he could press a slow and solemn kiss to Dean's temple. 'You fight for the thing you can win, Dean. You fight in the name of the only thing you have ever believed in, the only faith you've ever known.'

Dean bowed his head. The rain was coming down steadily. He could see his breath frost in the air as the temperature dropped, but he did not feel the cold or the wet. He sighed, long and low, because he didn't have to guess what Cas was talking about… _who_ he was talking about. Famine may have been right about the void in his soul, the emptiness he couldn't fill; but beyond that, in a place the horseman could not look, there was a pocket outside the reaches of time and beyond the effects of change, where Dean kept his sole and only purpose protected. It had sunshine for a smile and ambered-green eyes shot through with ocean blue, and what meager fragments of his heart remained, lay safe there in his brother's keeping.

'Sam.'

Castiel nodded. 'Sam. You fight for him, Dean, and all your victories will follow.'

 


End file.
